The opening weeks of the year are going to be defined by the UK's vaccine gap, amid rocketing Covid infections, rising hospitalisation numbers and test shortages.
According to the latest official figures, the majority of people in the UK have had at least one Covid jab. About five million people are affected by the 9% who have yet to bevaccinated, and the majority of them are being hospitalized.
Some senior staff in the National Health Service believe that up to 90% of the people on their wards are unvaccinated, but the most recent estimates show that only over half of the people need critical care. The people in charge of the Covid crisis might not be faced with such a difficult set of options if more people were given the vaccine.
The vaccine gap shows us how far away we are from being a society that understands itself.
It would highlight the unfairness of disrupting the lives of the majority to protect those who are still unjabbed if tighter restrictions were to become inevitable. Coercing people into getting vaccinations using stringent Covid passports would infuriate the Conservative backbenches, make Boris Johnson's future all but impossible, and even to many of us outside Conservative circles, it is a worrying extension of the state's reach. There are no clear and easy choices, other than retaining a vague hope that the sudden urgency of the epidemic might convince more people to get a vaccine, and keeping faith in the grassroots organizations currently doing their best to change minds.
The issues are straightforward to some people. Tony Blair was made a Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter ten days before he was made a man. He regretted his choice of words, but it was too late, as he had already triggered a wave of judgement on social media, suggesting that most unvaccinated people were either reckless fools or the disciples of those online cults.
The facts of the vaccine gap are more complicated than ever. According to the latest numbers published by the UK Health Security Agency, 30% of eligible people in the city are yet to receive their first jab. In the London boroughs of Newham and Tower Hamlets, the figure is 32% and 34% respectively. Our politicians still don't say much about conspiracy theory and misinformation, which are large and worrying features of the Covid era. Large numbers of unvaccinated people in cities reflect deeper questions of age, class, ethnicity, faith and language, and what poverty, insecurity and institutionalised prejudice do to people's relationship with the state. The limits of the vaccination drive remind us of a simple truth of power and politics: if governments ignore fundamental issues of trust and basic empathy, any big social rupture will reveal the consequences.
